Gigabyte Expands BRIX Family With a Gaming Version

Ultra compact PCs are getting more and more popular, so of course Gigabyte wants to be a part of it. Last year the company introduced its BRIX series, which features a range of ultra compact PCs that cater to almost all needs. Now the company wants to include gamers by introducing the GB-BXA8G-8890, which is a gaming oriented ultra compact PC that packs a pretty hefty wallop considering its size. To control it all, Gigabyte outfitted it with an A8-5557M, which is a Richland based APU from AMD. The chipset used is a AMD Bolton M3, which has two DDR3L slots that allow up to a maximum of 16 GB of RAM. For storage there is an mSATA slot and a regular SATA slot, so it is possible to have an mSATA SSD for the OS and a couple of apps, while a 2.5" hard drive contains all the games and other large files. The audio is the ALC269 and the internet is the RTL8111G, both developed by Realtek.

What makes this BRIX stand out compared to the others is the fact that the PC contains an AMD Radeon R9 M275X, which appears to be derived from the Radeon HD 8800M series. If it is from the HD 8800 series, then it should have 640 shader processors, a clock speed somewhere between 575 and 775 MHz, and a 128-bit path to 2GB of GDDR5 memory. The addition of a discrete graphics card should provide a significant boost over the integrated APUs used in many of these ultra compact PC, and according to The Tech Report, the Radeon R9 M275X should have a performance somewhat similar to a Radeon HD 7750.

As for external connectivity, the GB-BXA8G-8890 has two USB 3.0 ports and one head phone jack on the front. On the back, one finds one HDMI port, one Mini DisplayPort, two USB 3.0 ports, one RJ45, and the DC plug. All of the above mentioned is squeezed into a box that is 59.6x128x115.4 mm, which roughly translates to 2.35x5x4.54 inches.